iCloud email sees worldwide disruption of service

Apple iCloud users from New York to London are seeing selective outages of service that leave them without access to their iCloud mail accounts, a problem that has persisted for over a day.

An Apple Support Community page was created on Apr. 17 discussing the disruption of service and now has over 100 replies from affected users in the North America, Europe and as far as New Caledonia.

According to forum members who spoke with Apple support representatives, the outage is sporadic and does not affect a large number of iCloud users, however it seems that the problem is not confined to a specific area. The company's iCloud status page reports that less than one percent of all users are seeing problems with the mail service, and a fix is expected "ASAP."

"What is even more concerning is that after a 50 minute phone call, not one person (tech support, senior advisor, program leader, nor engineering department) had known that this was a pervasive issue. Not one," writes Apple Support forum member 'stadrummer.' "My account has been passed to the engineering department and I should hear back by tomorrow."

It was reported in January that over 85 million users had signed up for iCloud since its debut in October 2011, a rate that outpaced device sales at the time.

Affected users have no access to their iCloud mail accounts, whether it be from the web client to their iPhones, which points to a problem with a specific backend issue most likely originating from the company's separate mail servers. Apple's status page claims that only mail is affected while all other iCloud assets remain fully functional.

In December 2011, its was reported that U.S. .mac and .me users were experiencing problems with mail coming from Roadrunner and Comcast domains, though outgoing messages were left unaffected. The cause was ultimately found to be an accidental engagement of Apple's spam filters.

The source of the most recent issue is as yet unknown, and Apple hasn't released any information regarding the matter.